[China Halts Military Exchanges With U.S.]
Filed at 11:58 a.m. ET
BEIJING (AP) — China suspended military exchanges with the United States, threatened unprecedented sanctions against American defense companies and warned Saturday that cooperation would suffer after Washington announced $6.4 billion in planned arms sales to Taiwan.
[How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand]
The targeted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They’re the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means “handicapped bathroom.”)
But what if these sentences aren’t really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us? Read more
[Karzai Sees Taliban Pact as Central to Ending War]
LONDON — Afghanistan’s president declared Thursday that reaching out to the Taliban’s leaders should be a centerpiece of efforts to end the eight-year-old war there, setting in motion a delicate diplomatic process that will carry great risks for both Afghanistan and the United States. Read more
